Ä and Ö are letters. Drop the dots, change the word

Ranta is a shore. Räntä is sleet. The two words share every letter position and differ in four dots, and a Finn reading them does not experience a family resemblance between them at all. They are as unrelated as shore and sleet are in English.

That is the fact the two dots carry, and it survives almost no journey out of Finland. Booking systems delete them, spreadsheets sort them as if they were not there, and half the internet calls them umlauts.

Eight pairs, and the dots are the whole difference

Before the pairs, the sound, because that is what most people came for. Ä is the vowel in English cat, held steady rather than glided. Ö has no English equivalent: make the e of bed and round your lips as if for o without moving your tongue. Both are single pure vowels, and both are held for exactly as long as the spelling says.

None of those is a clever edge case. Räntä is in the weather forecast several months a year, häkä is on the alarm in the hallway, and lähti is the past tense of one of the commonest verbs in the language.

One dot, or all of them

The first six pairs and the last two behave differently, and the reason is vowel harmony.

A Finnish word is front or back and does not mix. A, o and u are the back vowels; ä, ö and y are their front partners. There is no way to put dots on the first a of ranta and leave the second alone. Both move, or neither does.

I and e are neutral and sit happily in either kind of word, which is why veli and väli can differ by exactly one pair of dots and both be perfectly ordinary Finnish. Same for lehti and lähti.

Finland sorts them last. Europe does not

The Finnish alphabet runs to the end as v w x y z å ä ö. Å is there because Swedish is a national language of Finland; Finns call it ruotsalainen O, the Swedish O, and it appears in Swedish names, hardly ever in a Finnish word.

This is where the two dots stop being a spelling question and become a software question. The European sorting standard EN 13710, built on the international standard ISO/IEC 14651, equates å and ä with a, and ö with o, because that is what most European languages do. Finland’s national adaptation, SFS-EN 13710, restores the Finnish order and puts the three letters at the end, and the expectation recorded by the Institute for the Languages of Finland is that IT products sold in Finland follow it.¹

The Unicode collation data says the same thing in more detail. Under the Finnish tailoring the alphabet finishes z, ž, þ, å, ä, æ, ö, ø, while á, à, â and ã all stay filed with plain a.² Accented letters sort next to their base letter. Ä and Ö do not, because they are not accented letters.

One name list therefore sorts two ways depending on the machine:

There is a nice piece of evidence for the distinction hiding in the Finnish rules for foreign letters. A German ü is alphabetised in Finland as equivalent to y, and š and ž are treated as equivalent to s and z. A French é sorts immediately after a plain e when the words are otherwise identical, so Hoffren comes before Hoffrén.³ Every borrowed diacritic gets folded onto the letter underneath it. Only Ä and Ö are given a place of their own, because in Finnish there is no letter underneath.

What happens to your name when the dots cannot travel

Names are registered in the Finnish population information system with their real spelling, and a search for a surname in the national name service is a search for that spelling.⁴ International systems mostly cannot hold it.

Yle looked at the travel case in 2015 and found no single rule anywhere. Travel agents recommended writing the ski-results form, in which Ä becomes ae, Ö becomes oe and Å becomes aa, on the grounds that turning Ä into a plain A causes trouble in some countries. Finnair’s own system simply dropped the dots. The passport and visa unit of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs told Yle there is no generally applicable instruction.⁵

What the article does give is the one workable rule, from a travel agent who deals with the consequences: match the machine-readable name printed at the foot of the passport page, whatever it says. The strictest destinations reported were the United States and parts of Asia, and for the United States the name on the ESTA authorisation has to match the ticket down to the spelling. The usual penalty for getting it wrong is a queue at a desk instead of an automated check-in, which is a small disaster on a tight connection.

Since that reporting is now over a decade old and airline systems change, check the current booking rule with the airline before you fly.

The rule that has not changed is the one underneath all of it. Kärkkäinen stripped of its dots is not a shortened Kärkkäinen. It is a string a computer produced, and the person is still called Kärkkäinen.